A First Look at Visual Studio 2010 Team System

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Two days ago the product team of the next version Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) started to lift the curtain on the next version named VSTS 2010. Furthermore, every day this week the team is publishing screen casts packed with information on the new features that will be in this new version. Each day the VSTS team focuses on another skew of the Team System Suite. so, yesterday the focus was on the Team System Architect Edition, which I find the most interesting anyway ;-) (yes, I might be biased….). Anyways, there are really some cool new features in that I can not wait to get may hands on. Below you can see, what I find, the highlights of the VSTS 2010 Architecture Edition screen casts:

• UML Diagrams: As I mentioned in an earlier post, Microsoft joined the OMG and will support UML 2.1 in the new version of VSTS. Not all 13 diagrams of UML will be supported in the first version, but the most commonly used once which are Use Case, Sequence, Class, Component, and Activity Diagrams. One exciting news is that OMGs definition of the Component Diagram evolved a lot from UML 1.x to 2.x and will provide a great option to model components.
• Architecture Explorer: This is a new and innovative tool to look at existing architectures. It enables to look at existing systems on a higher level of abstraction. The tool allows to import existing implementations and provides many filters so the view can be changed depending on the needs of the architect. I think this is huge and a great step forward in the way we look at systems not just in new development but also in the maintenance phase. It allows to easily view dependencies between objects and namespaces in a graphical way.

Architecture Explorer in Visual Studio Team System 2010

• Layer Diagram: Another new and cool tool is the layer diagram. This type of diagram enables to define the high level architectural layers of the system such as Application, Business, Data Access layer in a very simple and intuitive graphical representation AND allows to check these constraints automatically during implementation phase, way cool…..

Layer Diagram in Visual Studio Team System 2010

There are many more goodies announced by the VSTS teams, but these were the ones I personally liked best :-). If you want to see more: Click here for more information.